Your girl is playing professional volleyball in SWITZERLAND!!! Flying out to Zurich tonight. See you next year, LA. ??
I’m so grateful and excited for this opportunity. I can’t believe this day has finally arrived. Playing overseas has been a goal of mine for the past two years. Last year, I wasn’t offered any money. After receiving the news, I was pretty discouraged. This led me to Plan B: Grad school for teaching at UCI. After a quarter, I dropped out because I realized I wasn’t ready to teach. I still had so much to explore and experience. Plus, I didn’t want to teach Macbeth and Hamlet year after year. My lack of enthusiasm for old literature would only be doing a disservice to kids. I dropped out and it was the best decision I could have made.
Post grad life wasn’t easier. I felt lost and restless. I dipped my feet in a few job opportunities but decided I needed to give myself one more shot at playing volleyball overseas. I wanted to challenge myself to go to the next level. With the encouragement of my college volleyball coach, I went for it. I trained harder, quit my binge eating habits (I’ll definitely be sharing more about this later in the blog) and gave it all I had. Through this process, I came up with Sweat + Beauty LA. I was beginning to find pieces of who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live life.
Now, I’m sitting here writing this on a blue lounge chair at LAX, waiting for my flight to board to Switzerland for my first professional volleyball season. I am incredibly lucky to have an amazing volleyball coach, who is friends with great people, whom helped me get this contract. Luck presented me with this opportunity and I am so grateful.
So now that I have finished rambling, I hope that my two-year long journey inspires you to go for whatever it is that you want to do. Life is short. We are only young for so long. Whatever your big dream is, go get it. Be patient and grit through the hard days. You’re going to fail, it’s inevitable. Try again. The fact that I tried again is the reason why I am here.
Spread Love,
Annie Kim
